Help section, topic: Scoring
http://www.hitechcreations.com/ahhelp/scoring.html
That tells you how each statistic is calculated, but it doesn't tell you how those 5 or 10 stats are combined to determine rank for each mission type, or how the ranks for the different mission types are combined to determine overall rank. On the stats page you can see a rank for each statistic; are they just adding each player's ranks for the applicable stats and ranking the sums to determine flight category rank, and adding each player's flight category ranks and ranking the sums to get overall rank?
I wouldn't cry if rank went away, but I do like having the stats.
On the larger topic, I don't think there could be a scoring system that couldn't be gamed or didn't promote poor game play. The ultimate un-gamey scoring system, real life, certainly promoted a lot of things that many would consider poor game play here.
Btw, Krusty, I would think hot padding would do much more to improve your kills/sortie than the minute or so it takes to taxi and rearm would do to your kills/time. Likewise it seems improbable that augering would ever be good for score because it quarters your kill points for the sortie as well as hurting k/d. It's the using hot padding to fly long distances between fights, not the hot padding itself, that's going to hurt your score. The same is true if you play a bit more historically and up with 100% fuel 50 miles from the fight, or 150 miles for bombers. Anyway, the main reason I hot pad, and I suspect the same for a lot of players, has nothing to do with rank or "name in lights", it's to rearm ords at fields where ords are down, which I guess is a little gamey but not (IMHO) poor sportsmanship.